Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  ‘We were going to drive from Royal Lodge to the Castle. She was wearing some peep-toe sandals and as she got into the car she said, “Selina, I’ve got some chewing gum on my shoe!” So I had to get out and go round to the other side and pull the chewing gum off. Things were different then. If you’re brought up to have everything done for you, well, that’s just what you come to expect.

  ‘We then went to Windsor Castle and the archivist was there and we looked at all sorts of things, and it was wonderful, and Princess Margaret took us round the private apartment, and it was riveting. It was boiling hot and she said, “I think we should have a swim!” so we went to the huge indoor swimming pool and there was the wooden polo pony on which Prince Philip practised his swipes, and I said, “I’m awfully sorry Ma’am, I don’t have a costume.” And she said, “Oh, you can have one of Lilibet’s!”

  ‘It was a very frilly corseted costume, but anyway, I did struggle into it. PM didn’t want to swim because it would spoil her hair, and so she said, “We’ll walk up and down,” and so as she and I walked up and down the shallow end, I remember she said, “Selina, do you ever use Carmen rollers?” and I said, “Well, yes, Ma’am, as a matter of fact I do,” and she said, “But where do you buy them from?” and I said, “Boots, Ma’am,” and she said, “No! How TOO fascinating!”

  ‘Part of her longed to take part in ordinary life, yet without understanding what ordinary life was – like Lord Curzon who, accused of knowing nothing of the common man, jumped on a bus, then ordered it to take him to No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. She once told someone that she knew more than was generally supposed about the working classes, because, you see, she had always been surrounded by servants. She looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.

  ‘There was an absolutely horrific evening in 1982. Elizabeth Taylor had come over to play in Little Foxes,* and Princess Margaret took Derek Hart and me and Jeremy Fry and a couple of other people to see it. Princess Margaret didn’t go backstage afterwards. We all went back to Kensington Palace for dinner and Elizabeth Taylor was going to join us at Kensington Palace after she had got out of her costume, done her make-up and so on.

  ‘The drawing room at Kensington Palace is long and narrow, with the doors at one end and the drinks down the other. So we were all up the other end, talking, when suddenly ET appeared in the most ill-advised dress: she was very fat then and it was made of scarlet T-shirt material, so everything plunged, and her spare tyre, I remember noticing, was just a little bit bigger than her bust. Her dress was very short and she had high-heel sandals on and her legs were very big. She stood in the doorway and Princess Margaret just went on talking, ignoring her. Eventually Jeremy Fry said, “Oh Ma’am, Elizabeth Taylor has just arrived!” And Princess Margaret sighed and said, “Oh, well I suppose somebody had better offer her a drink!”

  ‘And so someone got her a drink and returned to the group. Elizabeth Taylor was just left standing there, and so, with my well-brought-up manners, I went up to her and I remember saying something idiotic and then I said, “That costume you were wearing in the second act was so beautiful, did you have any say in what you wore?” and she said, “Did I have any say in what I wore?! You bet your sweet bippy I had a say in what I wore!”

  ‘After a very awkward half-hour we went down to have dinner. It was a fairly long table and the man on my left immediately turned to talk to Princess Margaret and the man on my right, ignoring Elizabeth Taylor, began talking to the man on her other side, so she and I had no one to talk to. And so I leaned forward and, with my very good manners, I started talking to her.

  ‘Years before, when I’d been at Oxford, she and Richard Burton had come to do Dr Faustus at the Playhouse and so I said, ingratiatingly, that the production was absolutely wonderful and she said, “Oh wow, did you see that, oh I’m so glad!” and she began talking about it. Then, on my bare shoulder – I was wearing a strapless evening dress – I felt a sting like a wasp and I turned round and there was Princess Margaret’s fingernail. “Selina,” she said, “has nobody ever told you it’s rude to talk across the table?”

  ‘And then, finally, this very awkward meal ended and the ladies were taken out by PM to her bedroom. At the bottom of the bed there was a chaise longue in which had been laid out her underwear for the next day – corsets, a petticoat – but Elizabeth Taylor flung herself on the chaise. At this point, Princess Margaret turned round and said: “You’re lying on my underwear!”

  ‘“Well, that’s a kind of funny place to keep your underwear!”

  ‘And it went on getting worse and worse. When we finally rejoined the men, Princess Margaret started reciting the play and Elizabeth Taylor said, “That’s my part!” and Princess Margaret said, “No, I can do it!”

  ‘She had it by heart, it was amazing, and then she started to play the piano. Eventually at about 2 a.m., Princess Margaret looked at Elizabeth Taylor and said in a very loud voice, “Is anyone going to take her home – or we’ll have to find a sleeping bag?!”

  ‘Derek Hart said, “I’ve got a car.” So he and I drove Elizabeth Taylor back to Claridge’s or the Connaught. Later we were told that Princess Margaret had been out in California six months before and the Queen of Hollywood had snubbed Princess Margaret – she hadn’t curtseyed or something – and so this was Princess Margaret’s well-planned revenge. That was a friendship that was never going to work.

  ‘It was one of the few times apparently that Elizabeth Taylor didn’t have a man in her life. Someone said they felt sorry for her because there was no one to back her up: normally she’d have turned up with a boyfriend or walker. But she didn’t seem particularly fazed, I have to say.’

  The source of the feud between Princess Margaret and Elizabeth Taylor remains obscure. Speaking on The Jonathan Ross Show in March 2016, Carrie Fisher claimed that her father, Eddie Fisher, who was Elizabeth Taylor’s fourth husband, had once had an affair with Princess Margaret, so this may have contributed to it.*

  Then again, in a private conversation with the playwright Emlyn Williams in 1967, Princess Margaret described Elizabeth Taylor as ‘a common little thing’.* A stranger to discretion, Williams repeated her remark to all and sundry; word may well have got back to the victim.

  The following year, after Richard Burton presented Taylor with the huge Krupp Diamond, Princess Margaret remarked to a friend that it was ‘the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen’. Taylor heard of this slight. A while later, the two women met at a party. Taylor was wearing the diamond, and asked Margaret if she would like to try it on. Margaret slipped it on her finger. ‘Doesn’t look so vulgar now, does it?’ observed Taylor. This did nothing to assuage the friction between the two women.

  (Douglas Miller/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  In Gstaad on Monday, 20 October 1969, Richard Burton complained to his diary about having to fly to London the following day ‘to see Princess Margaret again at the opening night of Staircase’, adding that she is ‘infinitely boringly uncomfortable to be around’. At a film premiere in her presence, he had told the audience, ‘My name is really Richard Jenkins and up there is a lady whose name is Maggie Jones.’ It was a joke she had not enjoyed.

  On another occasion, Elizabeth Taylor committed the cardinal sin of keeping Princess Margaret waiting. ‘I did my utmost to get Liz to her appointments on time,’ recalled her butler, Raymond Vignale. ‘She would say, “I kept the Queen of England waiting for twenty minutes, Princess Margaret thirty minutes, and President Tito an hour. They can damn well wait for me for a few minutes at a meaningless dinner party.”’

  * The production attracted poor reviews. One critic declared that Taylor had made ‘an entrance worthy of Miss Piggy, trailing mauve lingerie’. Another described her voice as ‘a needle screeching across an ol
d 78 record’. A third called her Regina ‘as threatening as a pink blancmange’.

  * ‘I met Princess Margaret once,’ she told Ross. ‘I did. I really did. Well, they did The Empire Strikes Back and they did it over here. So we all went [to the premiere] with Alec Guinness, Harrison [Ford] and with Mark [Hamill] and as she was coming down the line I mentioned to my co-stars that my father had had sex with Princess Margaret. In a beautiful way they made love. Anyway, I did mention this. I am going to get in a lot of trouble for this! After the movie, we went over to the Savoy where the party was and Harrison had arrived at the party prior to my arrival and also before Princess Margaret had arrived as well. He came up to me and said, “Well, clearly your father will sleep with anybody.” He was joking. It was funny.’

  * Williams added that, from his point of view, the Princess was ‘a ridiculous tiny creature in pink with an enormous cigarette holder’.

  80

  At home in Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood was struggling to write a book about the Buddha, but kept finding himself interrupted by thoughts of Princess Margaret.

  He was due to meet the Princess at a party Kenneth Tynan was throwing that evening, Friday, 13 October 1978. Fearful lest his guests say the wrong thing, Tynan had issued instructions to both Isherwood and George Cukor to address the Princess as ‘Ma’am’, a skill that came easier to the British expatriate than to the American: ‘George is working himself up into a nervous cramp, like a young actor with only one line to say; he feels sure he’ll get it wrong and call her Mum or Mom or something.’

  The evening came close to going pear-shaped. In an effort to cut down on costs, the cash-strapped Tynans had decided on soul food served by a hip, cut-price caterer. When it looked as if the caterer was not going to materialise, Tynan vowed to go to the bathroom and kill himself. Fortunately the caterer arrived in the nick of time, and Tynan was soon back on form greeting his guests, who included Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, Gene Kelly, Sidney Poitier, Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, David Hockney and Neil Simon.

  The Princess proved even more of a catch in America than in Great Britain. ‘It was quite a sight to see Hollywood royalty scrambling over each other’s backs to get to real royalty,’ noted Tynan’s daughter Tracy. ‘People were shoving each other aside to get the princess’s attention.’

  Isherwood played it cool. ‘Meeting Princess Margaret was hardly a dance. We only got her in very short hops, and although Ken Tynan honored me by putting me at her table, I hardly got to tell her more than that I had been at a school which produced three archbishops of Canterbury in a row* – that was all the royal talk I knew; and Neil Simon’s wit, as he sat opposite me, was altogether silenced.’

  Isherwood’s final verdict was that the Princess ‘seemed quite a common little thing, fairly good-humored but no doubt quite capable of rapping your knuckles’.

  Ten days later, the Hollywood agent Sue Mengers arranged a party in honour of Princess Margaret at her home in Beverly Hills. Security was intense, with helicopters circling above and police everywhere. Every guest was carefully checked.

  Princess Margaret arrived in a black and silver dress by Dior with a diamond necklace and earrings left to her by her grandmother, Queen Mary.

  ‘I already knew Princess Margaret, so I was considered socially safe enough to be seated at her right hand at the dinner table,’ recalled Michael Caine, who over the years had become what he called ‘a sort of British Social Ambassador whenever royalty or the aristocracy came to visit us’. The others on the Princess’s table were Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, Nick Nolte, Danny Kaye, Joni Mitchell, Steve McQueen (‘high on coke’ according to his ex-wife Ali MacGraw, who was also there), Neil Diamond, Gene Hackman, Peter Falk, Barry Diller, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Clint Eastwood and – by royal request – Barry Manilow. Scattered across the remaining half a dozen tables were Sean Connery, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and John Travolta. This was, in many ways, the Princess’s perfect environment. It was said of the Duke of Windsor that what he liked best was to meet new people for not more than ten minutes at a time, and this weakness applied to her too.

  Sue Mengers had placed the fashionable governor of California, Jerry Brown, to the Princess’s left. It was clear from the start that he was not going to stand on ceremony. He had mastered the first lesson of royal etiquette – the correct form of address – but considered further deference unnecessary.

  ‘Good evening, Your Highness,’ he said. ‘I just dropped by to say hello. I have another appointment so I’m only staying for the first course.’

  This did not go down well. Caine noticed that throughout Brown’s little introductory speech the Princess maintained a rigid smile, but once he had finished, ‘she just turned her back on him without a word and engaged me in conversation until he left’.

  The Princess was served her meal first, and then Governor Brown was served his. At this point the governor’s girlfriend, the singer Linda Ronstadt, walked over to the table in a white cotton mini-dress and little red boots, put one hand on the governor’s shoulder and the other on the Princess’s shoulder, peered closely at their plates and said, ‘What are we having to start?’ She then took a piece of food off Brown’s plate and popped it into her mouth.

  ‘I have seen people shrug many times,’ recalls Caine. ‘But the Princess’s shoulder shrugged that night like a punch from a boxer and with almost the same effect on Miss Ronstadt. She almost overbalanced and fell on the floor. The Princess never again during the evening acknowledged Jerry Brown’s presence, nor his departure when he finally left.’

  Once Governor Brown had gone, the atmosphere perked up, though there was a bit of a blip when Jack Nicholson allegedly leaned over and offered the Princess some of his cocaine, ‘in a bid to get to know her better’. The Princess declined his invitation, but took it in good heart. She remained at the party until 12.30 a.m., dancing with John Travolta, among others. Before she left, she told Michael Caine how much she had enjoyed herself, adding, ‘But I didn’t like that dreadful man at all.’

  Like many an over-conscientious hostess, Sue Mengers failed to enjoy her own party; nerves had clearly got the better of her. ‘Every time Princess Margaret looked my way I curtseyed. I was curtseying all night! She thought I was an idiot.’

  * Repton: Archbishops Temple, Fisher and Ramsey.

  81

  The most unlikely figures lost their nerve in the presence of Princess Margaret. Marlon Brando once asked Kenneth Tynan to arrange an introduction. Accordingly, Tynan took them for a dinner à trois at Parkes restaurant in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge.

  ‘For the only time in my experience I saw him over-awed, literally unable to address her except through me: “Would you ask Princess Margaret what she thinks of …” etc.

  ‘HRH said next day on the phone that this wasn’t an uncommon reaction. “People just clam up. I’m told it’s like going on television for the first time.”’

  Her sister, both more forbidding and more cautious, takes active steps to prevent over-excitement. Guests entering Buckingham Palace are discreetly asked if they would care to spend a penny before being presented.

  82

  I had a friend at school called Michael, who was the second son of a lord. His brother William was two or three years above. The two brothers were in many ways different: Michael was quite sporty and disorganised, whereas William was more bookish and dutiful, eventually becoming house captain. But they were both extremely nice, with a shyness and diffidence rare in public school boys; they were both much given to blushing.

  In our final two years, Michael would sometimes invite friends to stay at one of his family homes. By the time I left school I think I had stayed in them all, or nearly all: a town house in Chelsea, a holiday house in France, a castle in Yorkshire, a stately home in Norfolk. Later, when watching Brideshead Revisited on television, I couldn’t help thinking of Michael’s family, though they were in fact substantiall
y better off than the Marchmains, and would probably have regarded them as middle-class. Their homes were strewn with the sort of masterpieces we both studied for History of Art A-Level: a Rembrandt painting was displayed on an easel in one of the drawing rooms, and forgotten corridors at the top of the house were virtually wallpapered with Dutch landscapes by Ruisdael.

  The grandeur of their houses was offset by the reticence of the family itself. They tended to speak to one another with such courtesy that a passer-by might have assumed they had only just met.

  In the hallway of their grandest home the family kept a large leather-bound visitors’ book, in which, at the end of their stay, guests would be asked to write their names. Here and there a photograph would be stuck in the book, to commemorate a family event or a special celebration.

  ‘Would you all be sure to sign your names in the book before you go?’ Michael’s mother asked over breakfast on the last morning of one of our stays.

  When it came to writing my name, I nosily leafed through the rest of the book. One quite recent page was devoted to a single signature, three times the size of anyone else’s: ‘Margaret’. Below it was a colour photograph, about nine inches by five inches, of Princess Margaret standing in the same hallway, looking towards the camera. She was wearing a light-blue dress, her customary vivid make-up, and a fixed smile. Standing next to her, looking a little awkward, but no more awkward than usual, was Michael’s elder brother William, in a tweed jacket, collared shirt and the type of trousers that would later come to be known as chinos.